Toni Morrison Jazz

About Jazz

Toni Morrison's Jazz (1992) is the second volume of her Beloved trilogy — set in 1926 Harlem during the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. Joe Trace shoots his young lover Dorcas; his wife Violet disfigures the body at her funeral. What makes the novel extraordinary is its narrator: the self-aware voice of the city of New York itself, which explicitly tells us it has been wrong and re-imagines the story. One of the most original experiments in American fiction.